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They all seem to have fixed on an image of Bush as nothing more than a chimpanzee in cowboy gear.

Yuk! How can be someone so masochist?
On the other hand, do you know the one about the three Texas surgeons?

i don't like *any* of the candidates. low turn-outs should signal that people are apathetic about the choices we're given, and don't agree with anyone.

I can guarantee you that nobody gives shit one what the nonvoters think: not the GOP, not the Democrats, not the third parties. This is because nonvoters (surprise surprise) are not likely voters. The likely voters are party aparachniks, idealogues (usually leaning conservative), and moderates, and they determine policy. If you don't like it, too bad, because the politicians aren't going to cater to you.

If you really want to give people other options, you might want to run for office yourself.

fearbush.com

an * ti * cli * max (an'-tI-clI-max): A series of statements in some ascending order, ending with a statement clearly lower than each of the previous statements. e. g.: "The ASCI White Computer: 12.3 trillion calculations/second (teraflops), 8,192 copper microprocessors, 6.2 terabytes memory, 512 RS/6000 375 MHz POWER3 SMP High Nodes, IBM AIX operating system."

fearbush.com

Give the man even a two-hour lecture on what Wicca is, and let's see if his tune changes.

When Bush said that he didn't believe Wicca was a religion, it set off such a shitstorm in the pagan community that almost everyone got involved. Many of us sent Bush books, pamphlets, etc. He's had more than enough information on the subject sent to him, and he's had plenty of opportunity to study up on this. His more recent statement to voter.com re-iterating his anti-minority-religion viewpoint emphasizes that despite this, his mind hasn't changed. We cannot give him the benefit of the doubt on this issue.

fearbush.com

Yep particularly relevant due to the recent legislation to restrict pagan ritual rights... wait, there isn't any.

How about Bob Barr's 1999 attempt to forbid Wiccan soliders from practising on bases and ships?

References:

• The Atlanta Journal-Constitution archives
• The Witches' Voice archives of the Barr incident.

Thank gods it was defeated, but Bush has stated that he agrees with Barr's position.

fearbush.com

Never once has Bush proposed a crackdown on religious minorities, despite the flagrant ignorance of such religions that he displays. That's more than can be said for some of the candidates."

In the next five years, we anticipate that two-thirds of software will be distributed over the Internet, making it more important than ever to ensure strong copyright protection for computer software. In the United States, much of the legal framework already exists, but we need to redouble our efforts on enforcement. In particular, the next President must make sure that the US Department of Justice and US law enforcement agencies have the resources to enforce our intellectual property laws. In the international community, the challenge is even tougher since we must both help establish a legal framework for intellectual property protection and ensure it is enforced.

Does this worry anyone here besides me? I hear about getting US law enforcement involved in copyright protection, and I start thinking about stepped-up abuses of procedure similar to those carried out by the FBI, the BATF, and the DEA in recent years. It's bad enough that the MPAA and Judge Kaplan have basically declared that source code is not free speech; are we going to see stormtroopers with machineguns tearing up the homes of WINE developers?

fearbush.com

First off, I'd like to congratulate Ryan Gordon for this wonderful bit of satire. I'm sure you had a lot of your readers fooled on this one.

OK, so with that being said, here's how I would react if I thought this was a real letter from Bill Gates.

So, a Linux effort has finite resources to start with. Eventually a good idea is concieved, and executed, and on the rare occasion that it produces quality results, there is a split. In this case, I am referring to KDE. For several petty reasons I will get into later, GNOME was started in direct response to KDE, and began duplicating its functionality.....To continue my example, GNOME was started because KDE, an open source project, used an open, but not "free" library of custom controls called "Qt". Qt was not acceptable to the free software movement, so therefore all of the work done on KDE was "tainted" in their eyes. Their solution? Rewrite the whole thing. As GNOME work commenced, another faction began work on "Harmony" with the goal of replacing Qt at the API level with a "free" implementation.

No Bill, GNOME is not just a reaction to KDE. It's also a reaction to Microsoft's COM, DCOM and COM+, and to Javabeans. GNOME stands for Gnu Netrowk Object Model Environment. The desktop is only one part of the project; the rest of it is creating a very large set of components to work from.

You should feel proud in a way, Bill, that the Open Source movement is borrowing heavily from Microsoft's techniques for system-building. And for that very reason, you shouldn't be selling the GNOME project short.

That having been said, Gates's broader point about redundant effort is well taken. If this revolution is going to be at all successful, then we have to stop eating each other alive and keep working together. Once we have an open source answer to a problem, we have got to stop re-inventing the wheel, and start thinking instead in terms of porting that solution to many different tool sets. (How many graphical libraries do we have?)

Let me dwell a little longer on the topic of corporate acceptance. Years ago, the "problem" with Linux was a lack of hardware drivers. Today, that problem still exists, and even though many people seem to think otherwise, I've yet to hear reports of a working, let alone robust DVD player for this "desktop" operating system. I hear horror stories about incompatible and difficult to configure 3D accelerators. Linux has not gotten to the point where you can walk into CompUSA and grab something off the shelf and expect it to work in any form with the OS. This is not a new story, but it is downplayed more today. I can not pretend that the Linux kernel has not improved, but it has not improved at the rate that Torvalds and his bunch of merry men pretend it has, and that's largely due to companies that will not release hardware programming information. They aren't interested in Open Source, and they don't want to be troubled by it.

That's not a bad critticism, and it's extensible to pretty much any company that deals with Linux. When Oracle announced that they weren't going to support Sequent anymore, IBM (Sequent's parent company) announced a Linux emulator for Sequent. They could have had all those fancy programmers of theirs, including the OS/2 programmers, working on the Linux kernel and other bits, but no such luck.

One of the things that the Open Source community can do to counteract this is to adopt open hardware standards. SoundBlaster keeps their standards open; so has, for the most part, the processor developers, although I'm less certain about IA-64.

Officially, Microsoft has always kept at a safe distance with Linux. We leave the actually muddying to others, like Mindcraft.

Well, at least you're decent enough to admit it :).

The average Linux user has a much more direct response. Generally speaking, if you were to ask a Linux user the benefits of Linux they will not tell you about its merits, but rather Windows's flaws. I am generally distrustful of anyone that defines themselves by what they are against and not what they are for.

Part of the reason why the Open Source community is so fond of knocking Windows and Office is because we like having control of our software. Open Source gives us control; Microsoft, by contrast, removes control. It is healthy for us to provide this contrast if it helps to define what we're all about.

This attitude is pervasive in the community: even the leaders of this counter-culture act like children!

What's a counterculture worth if you can't act like children occasionally? Even you had to get a genuine kick out of Windows Refund Day.

If they aren't making fun of our pleads for Freedom to Innovate...

Oh Lord, not this again. The issue in the Microsoft trial was never freedom to innovate; the issue was whether Microsoft broke antitrust laws. Please, for crissakes, stop believing your own press. I'm asking you this as a shareholder.

...(something they do themselves, when legal processes stop them; ask the people at linuxvideo.org what they think of their "freedom to innovate" with their DVD player)...

This brings up a good point. If you want the freedom to innovate, how about helping yourselves and everyone else out by joining us in opening up the patent process?

This brings me to the next point: infighting. The primary spokesmen for Linux are Richard M. Stallman, a professor, and Eric S. Raymond, a (self-proclaimed) writer. I won't waste your time on each's inflexible opinion of what Linux should be, except to note that both have a variation on the messages of open source's charity and selflessness. Give away your source code to make a better product? Doubtful. Give away your source code to protect your freedoms? Hardly. Ironically, both need to defend their feel-good mantras for purely selfish reasons. And, while both desperately need Linux to thrive for shameless self-promotion, the two spokesmen spend their time trying to show that the other is not just incorrect, but downright evil. They probably do as much harm as good for their cause. How can anyone be productive when one has to expend energy to argue the fundamentals of such artificial concepts as "Free Software" and "Open Source?"

This should give all of us in the Open Source world pause. Look, we can like or dislike Raymond and/or Stallman all we like. Let's just remember that without them, and Linus, most of us wouldn't be here discussing the Linux phenomenon at all. Especially not Gordon. Excuse me. Gates. :)

In the meantime, I hope they enjoy their 5.6 percent of the desktop. It won't last.

But who cares about the desktop market? The future is the distributed market. That's why Microsoft is developing .NET, isn't it?

In any case, what do you want to bet that someone is going to misattribute this to ol' Bill in a few years, as an example of a collosally stupid statement? Personally, I'm still optimistic. :)

fearbush.com

So I'm here trying to figure out how the "Guinness Sucks" phrase could possibly be confused as an actual Guinness trademark by any reasonable person. At first I thought it was because the Guinness people were drinking too much of their fine product, when it suddenly struck me....."Guinness sucks" is going to be their new advertising slogan. Maybe they're looking to produce a line of beer that sucks? Could they possibly be in the market for one of the American brewers, such as Miller or Budweiser?

Any way you slice it, this complaint and subsequent decision belong in the Guinness company's own Book of World Records for Stupidest Legal Complaint Lobbied by a Multinational Corporation.

fearbush.com

Why is it that when somone does something good, AND gets paid the first post from slashdotters are nothing but bitches?

Ah, but that's what moderators are for.......

fearbush.com

Although they may seem alike in some respects (both are set in a fantasy world with fantastic creatures, monsters, magic, etc.) one was produced by Hollywood studios for millions of dollars, while the other was produced by a band of computer geeks who barely know each other and wanted all the thrill of a role-playing game without much of the actual role-playing. While MUD (the movie) does have a cast of thousands of characters, all of them have (mostly) the same items, with the lead characters having an insane amount of gold and experience. What's worse, they fight the same monsters over and over again, sometimes into the wee hours of the morning, with long breaks where the characters do nothing but sleep. The characters start saying things for no apparent reason (what does 'lag' mean anyway?) and sometimes disappear or end up frozen in place for no apparent reason.

While there is nothing illegal about MUD (the movie), we are concerned that unscrupulous theater managers and video vendors may try to pass off MUD (the movie) as D&D (the movie). Don't settle for immitations. The real D&D movie is not yet in theatres, nor are tapes of it available. If someone should represent MUD (the movie) as D&D (the movie) please contact the MPAA immediately. It is vitally important that the MPAA not be denied the money it needs to dest^H^H^H^Hprotect artistic freedom. Thank you.

fearbush.com

Lawful Good: Pay to watch the movie. Buy a copy on tape or DVD for the family.

Another take on it:

• Lawful Good: Doesn't see the movie, as tempting as it may be, because s/he knows that that money is going to trample on our rights
• Lawful Neutral: Hunt down counterfeiters on the Web and turn them in to the MPAA
• Lawful Evil: Work for the MPAA, on their legal team.
• Neutral Good: Figure out what's worse: not seeing the movie and possibly harming the role-playing-game genre as far as the corporate public goes, or seeing the movie and paying the MPAA to trample on your rights. Go with your conscience.
• True Neutral: See the flick. Or don't see the flick. Depends on your tastes.
• Neutral Evil: Work for a major movie studio as an advertising executive.
• Chaotic Good: If you must see the movie, sneak in. If the cops hassle you about it, explain that it's a political protest.
• Chaotic Neutral: Buy movie ticket, eat it. Beat up usher with a trout.
• Chaotic Evil: Become a prodcer.

But that's just me.

fearbush.com

The older I get, the more complicated I realize life is, and the more I think people need to have options. But that's just me.

fearbush.com

I respectfully disagree. This election isn't just about who's going to sit in the White House for the next four years; it's about who's going to sit on the Supreme Court for the next twenty.

Bush has stated that his favorite Justices on the Supreme Court are Scalia and Thomas. At present, at least two and maybe four Supreme Court justices are approaching the point where they will need to retire from the bench. These justices are all moderates or liberals and their replacements could decide on issues of privacy, reproductive freedom, and civil rights, in the very near future. A Bush election could mean the end of Roe v. Wade. A lot of people on the left would perceive this as a major loss, and it's not just Bush that they're going to blame.

I humbly submit to the reader, that a Bush win means four white-knuckle years for the Left, a Democratic party that's going to shift further to the right under the direction of the Democratic Leadership Council, and a Green Party that will lose its legitimacy with the Left. A Gore win gives the Left more wiggle room, and a chance to 'guilt' Gore into following up on his proposed policies in his book Earth in the Ballance.

That's my two cents, although it's probably worth less than that.

fearbush.com

You may be able to help the Greens this way in other states too; check your local Green party and/or your local election laws.

fearbush.com

I'm glad that we have Excel2k and Word2k running on Wine, at least to the point where we can get a screenshot. That's a huge step foreward. But how stable is it beyond that? Can we run Excel2k and be 99% sure that it won't crash on us?

fearbush.com

What I realized then was that the phenomenon later to be known as Moore's Law [the prediction that transistor capacity would double every 18 months] was causing a logarithmic increase in processing power, and yet the throughput capacity was hardly changing at all.

Do you think we should tell him that processor speeds are increasing expoentially, and not logarithmically? I personally don't have the heart...

That having been said, I'm voting Gore in 2000 anyways. He's at least a little more clueful than the other guys. Besides which, IMO, this race isn't just about who's in the White House for the next four years, but who's on the Supreme Court for the next 20. Roe v. Wade hangs in the ballance. But that's just my opinion.

fearbush.com

I would pay good money to see the following:

"Hi there. I'd like to buy a PC."

"Very well sir, would you like Windows ME or Windows 2000 with that?"

"Actually, you can just leave off the operating system."

"Sir, I can assure you that we are best equipped to install your operating system."

"OK, in that case, do dual boot Debian/OpenBSD install with this hard drive partitioning that I'm going to write down..."

fearbush.com

Radio broadcasters pay a royalty to the composer & publisher to play a song. The record company doesn't get anything.

Jumping Jesus on a Pogo stick....who do you think the publisher is?? 90% of the time it's the record company that signed the artist.

More to the point, however, the really fat money comes not from radio broadcasts, but from record sales.

The Tyrrany Begins....

SOAP could be a good idea, but I'm not exactly sure that I like the security holes that it opens up. Counterpane points out that Microsoft's own security analysis faults SOAP for being able to "hide" protocol commands from firewalls. That basically means that you either prevent SOAP from at all functioning across your firewall, or go without a firewall. Granted, firewalls aren't the best security policy in the world, but I'd rather be assured that they'll work as advertised than have to worry about a brand new hole.

The Tyrrany Begins....

Here's a go.

Microsoft .NET is basically a virtual machine, kinda like the Java virtual machine. The virtual machine works with several different languages. This makes debugging and development easier than before.

Of course the big problems with virtual machines are that you get a performance hit, and your code will only run on those platforms which have an implementation of the machine. I'm not holding my breath for Microsoft to port the .NET machine to Solaris or Linux anytime soon, or to release the specs so that others can do it, either.

Basically, it looks to me like a Java ripoff.

Hope this helps.

The Tyrrany Begins....

Here's an idea: why not set it up so that one can go to MP3.com's web page and automatically send a fax to one's favorite legislator?

I mention this because this is the same tactic used by the ACLU, and I *always* get a reply from a fax. I can only imagine that this also generates a lot of real paper, too.

The Tyrrany Begins....

Why use hard drives at all? Why not put the whole thing -- OS and software and all -- on ROMs? It's cheaper, less likely to get badly damaged, and execution time goes up.

The Tyrrany Begins....

You can play your own version of RoboCup using the JavaBots package from Carnegie Mellon University. All you need is JDK 1.1 or better running on any box. I know I had fun with this when I was a grad student!

The Tyrrany Begins....

In 52001, the inhabitants of Earth will capture a sattelite and take it to Outpost Headquarters where paleologists will unlock it and find inside small platters of glass....

"Look," they will say, "perfectly preserved glass platters that our ancient ancestors used for record-keeping once! And they're remarkably well preserved!"

Many years are spent, graduate students (if they still exist in 52001) come and go having completed dissertations on the decoding of the Orbital Glass Platters, thousands will wonder what the ancients used to think were important. Eventually they manage to decode some of the Ancient Tounge, with a mere 50,000 words in it, barely enough to fill a single memory cell in one of the millions of cockroachbots that comprise a part of the Human galactic ecosystem.

Once the initial progress is made, it is only a matter of seconds before a fully aware translator is coded, compiled, and executed to start the drudging work of making sense of the Ancient Glass Platters. Word spreads out from Earth through the networks of spaceborne miniroaches via radio, until thousands of years later the full content of the platters spreads throughout the Human galaxy. Our decendents will wonder at the strange and quaint sense of humor of the ancients, who were just beginning the age of mass communication and intelligent robotics.

"What," they will wonder, "is 'first post' supposed to mean?"

The Tyrrany Begins....

I guess it's time for us to dust off the f00f bug jokes that plagued Intel when the Pentium first came out....

Q: What's that 'Intel Inside' sticker called? A: A warning label!

Comeon folks, use 'em if you got 'em...let's get all this out of our system before Jay Leno and Dave Letterman get on the bandwagon tonight and ruin the fun for everyone...

The Tyrrany Begins....

What would COBOL look like if it was in Japanese?

It would probably look like C written by first-year CS students.

The Tyrrany Begins....

This is not just flamebait, it is known and well-established that a lot of those "protesters" were paid to stir up trouble by whacko left-wing groups trying to draw attention to their causes.

For what it's worth, I've organized protest movements in the past, and we've never had to rely on paid protestors to show up and deliver the message. This country is large enough so that for any issue, you will find a significant number of people who will get pissed off about something, as long as it's fresh and current. Usually, you can rely on large numbers of students to fill the ranks, as well as people who are 'lifetime' radicals, who have pretty much made the politics of protest the center of their life. (You might call this latter group a bunch of losers, but on the other hand, you have to admire someone who foregoes the usual comforts for a cause they believe in.)

Frankly, I'd be quite surprised if any of these folks were brought to the protests by monetary incentives.

Of course, if you should have proof to substantiate your claims, you're free to post it here.

The Tyrrany Begins....

...can be found on the Philadelphia Independent Media Center website. Warning: this information is heavily slanted to the protesters' points of view. On the other hand, it's also a neet application of Slash.

The Tyrrany Begins....

I find it helps to stop and pray, even if just for a minute. I lean back in my chair, put my feet up on my desk and ask God for inspiration. It's helped me out of blocks many times.

In my case, I find that a lesser banishing ritual of the pentagram helps.

Mutatis mutandis for your own faith.

The Tyrrany Begins....

Hey, I just realized what this means. If it's reflective on such a wide range of frequencies, that means that the amount of multiplexing data compression you can do is huge. One of these fibers might be able to carry a hundred times more data then any current fiber, for instance, just by having sub-bands that use different light frequencies. Each band would think they had exclusive use of the superfiber, so they could all be running at max datarate.

Just what we need. Another 50,000 channels of cable TV.

...how is this any different from the "plasma ball" device, which has been on the shelves of novelty shops for years, and which operates by passing an electric current through an inert gas contained within a plexiglas bulb?

The Tyrrany Begins....